Amit Chaudhuri at The Point:

In the late 1990s, I read a short story by Nirmal Verma called “Terminal.” It had been written, like all of Verma’s fiction, in Hindi, and translated into English by the critic Alok Bhalla. I knew something of Verma’s work, because his reputation was a national one. I had taken him to be a kind of European writer in Hindi, though I hadn’t formed this thought clearly in my head, and, if I had, wouldn’t have known with certainty what “European writer” meant. Let’s say a kind of vague symbolist aura—an aura of lyricism but also the air of the nouveau roman—adhered faintly to the reputation. Europeanness was confirmed by Verma’s peculiar personal history: how he went to Prague in 1959 as a literary translator and spent nearly a decade there until his departure during the upheaval of the Prague Spring. During his time there he wrote a travelogue as well as his first novel, Ve Din (translated into English under the title Days of Longing), arising from his experience of Prague. And this period also saw in Hindi literature the emergence of the nayi kahani movement, which in its literal translation—“New Story”—conveyed its own breakaway nature, its movement away from conventional realism toward (given the ethos of the time) the “existential” and the inward (terms that have become obsolete in a way that the stories haven’t), the word nayi or “new” containing in it a powerful suggestion of the strange. Verma was among the movement’s helmsmen.

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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Artificial intelligence has undergone its most scrupulous maths test yet. The results are in, and the AI models that took part didn’t live up to the problem-solving skills of top mathematicians.

The test — part of a project called First Proof, which aims to evaluate the ability of AI to solve complex questions in mathematics — posed ten research-level maths problems to four AI systems. A jury of anonymous human specialists in the relevant mathematical fields then assessed the models’ answers. This test was the first of its kind to satisfy three key conditions simultaneously: first, it consisted of research-level maths questions; second, it involved problems that did not appear in the training data; and third, it was formally graded by mathematicians. The results were unveiled on the First Proof website on 10 June.

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Lindsey Bever in The Washington Post:

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Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and Benjamin Recht in The Ideas Letter:

Last month, Pope Leo XIV himself anointed an esoteric subfield of AI research. Midway through his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, he calls for a “deepening of scientific research” into AI. As he explains, this research is necessary to moral discernment because knowing how AI works is a precondition for serious ethical inquiry. The pope concludes that further research is needed in “interpretability”: AI research that aims to understand how AI systems work and explain why they behave as they do.

For interpretability researchers, answers to these questions lie in discovering some causal mechanism under the hood. Neural networks are black boxes that must be pried open. Researchers often speak of “internal representations,” which encode how models structure information about the world. Pope Leo explicitly invokes these representations in the encyclical. We know very little about them, he says, because AI developers do not design every detail of their models. Instead, “current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’” While elsewhere the pontiff is critical about the prospect of such intelligence, here he seems to quote copy directly from the major AI labs. In fact, he is. Sitting to his left at the encyclical launch was Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic.

Olah is a leading advocate of interpretability, and the cultivation metaphor is his. For years, he has drawn analogies between biology and AI, declaring about machine learning that its elegance “is the elegance of biology, not the elegance of math or physics.” At the encyclical launch, Olah went even further: “… what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for.”

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Catherine Schenk in Phenomenal World:

One of the mainstays of the global order for the past seventy years has been American economic leadership and the use of the US dollar as the core means of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. This global function has never been without difficulties—in the aftermath of Bretton Woods and the Nixon Shock, scholars like Robert Triffin and Susan Strange identified the domestic and international costs of dollar dominance. The debate reignited after the global financial crisis of 2008, with some scholars warning that increased politicization of the dollar may prompt a gradual transition into a multipolar global currency system, and others continually championing the dollar’s institutional strength and the absence of credible alternatives.

Recent geopolitical conflicts around the world have only exacerbated doubts about the future of American hegemony, including the future of its currency. Unpredictable political leadership, trade wars, and the eruption of armed conflict in Europe and the Middle East have heralded a new era for the global system and generated proliferating predictions of de-dollarization. All this has accelerated in Trump’s second term, which seems to be actively laboring to throw the status of the dollar into disarray.

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Pranab Bardhan in Sidecar:

It is now widely recognized – a recent editorial in the New York Times proclaimed it openly – that the Trump presidency is by far the most corrupt in American history, a history characterized by several none-too clean presidencies. The continuous self-dealing, brazen self-enrichment of Trump and his family, involvement in sleazy crypto-currency deals, numerous cases of insider trading (3,600 lucrative stock trades reported in the first quarter of this year alone, in what looks like a scam run from within the Oval office itself), presidential pardons for crooks in a well-organized system of quid pro quo, now attempts to exempt Trump and family from auditing by tax authorities, a pre-emptive exoneration of the Trump family from financial crimes, as well as looting from taxpayers to create a slush fund to reward cronies and other criminals – the list goes on and is unprecedented. As for the country itself, according to the Transparency International ranking – which, though flawed, is one of the few of its kind available – in 2025 it reached its worst ranking ever: 29^th. In other words there are 28 countries less corrupt than the US.

India, of course, has generally been more corrupt than the US. Its Transparency International ranking in 2025 was 91. But the country’s political leadership is by no means as kleptocratic. In fact, the current regime came to power in 2014 after a major backlash against the corruption scandals of the previous government (though it turned out that these were somewhat overblown by the media and the incoming BJP, as well as a government audit agency that had an exaggerated estimate of the amount of money involved). With much fanfare, the new regime promised to clean up India’s act.

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Todd Shy in The American Scholar:

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch.

In What’s So Great About the Great Books?, she is trying to win converts, not slay opponents. Kanakia acknowledges upfront that the category is not timeless and unobjectionable. The Great Books began as a series of 20th-century initiatives that shaped core curricula at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. It led to the production of the influential Harvard Classics series (which launched Montás’s own Great Books journey) and went on to inspire The New Lifetime Reading Plan (1960) by Clifton Fadiman, whose revised version became Kanakia’s own reading roadmap. We should add Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994) to this genealogy.

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Holding to the Great Form

Holding to the great form
All pass away,
They pass away unharmed, resting in great peace.

It is for food and music that the passing traveler stops.

When the Tao appears from its opening
It is so subtle, it has no taste.
Look at it, you cannot see it.
Listen, you cannot hear it.

Use it

You cannot Exhaust it.

by Lao Tzu 
from Tao Te Ching
Translation by Charles Muller
Barns and Noble Classics, NY

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Justin Smith-Ruiu at Romanticon:

One of the loveliest documented moments of the 1966 Newport Folk Festival features Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf in a rare improvised performance. The beauty of it might be thought, on an initial viewing, to be compromised by the presence of a white fellow on the stage, one who will no doubt read for some as “dorky,” gesticulating exuberantly, strumming some indeterminate instrument but adding little. One might assume this man had been among the organizers of the event, perhaps some Harvard ethnomusicologist or the like. The angle and distance and quality of the recording reveal little of his class habitus, or of the quality of his dental care. All we can really make out is his “race,” and this is enough to mark him, in our contemporary world’s taxonomy of musical traditions, as quite out of place. Even I, who am arguably quite such a “white ou” myself, found his display somewhat unseemly at first, like the blond dreadlocks of the self-identified Rastafarian skater of your worst high-school memories, like the hackey-sackers in Sex Wax shirts I had to chase from the parking lot when, in the summer of 1989, I found myself briefly employed as security guard at an N.W.A. concert.

But look closer, and some further salient features will come into view.

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Mark Johnson and Saumya Khandelwal in the Washington Post:

A 2008 paper in the journal Ecological Economics found that between 1992 and 2007 the loss of vultures in India led to an estimated increase of about 5.5 million dogs, 38 million additional dog bites and more than 47,000 extra deaths from rabies.

A paper published a year ago in the American Economic Review concluded that in certain districts, “the functional extinction of vultures — efficient scavengers who removed carcasses from the environment — increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation.”

That analysis considered not just rabies, but all human deaths related to the loss of vultures — including those from water contaminated by cattle carcasses. Researchers estimated that India suffered, on average, 104,386 additional deaths, and almost $70 billion in extra costs, each year.

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Dario Amodei at his own website:

In one of the side plots to The Lord of the Rings, two of the Hobbits attempt to rouse Treebeard—a wise but ponderous sentient tree—to defend his forest from an army that is cutting it down. The problem is that Treebeard operates at a very different speed than the Hobbits. It takes him a full day simply to say hello to another tree, so getting him and his peers to act fast enough is nearly impossible.

The intersection of AI and our political institutions feels a bit like the Hobbits and Treebeard. AI is advancing at a lightning pace—in only four years, AI models have gone from barely being able to write a coherent line of code to writing most of the code at major AI companies. Similar gains have been made in biology, physics, math, finance, law, translation, and many other fields. AI’s scaling laws, which predict an exponential increase in general cognitive capabilities with increasing computing power, now have over a decade of empirical evidence behind them. If these scaling laws continue for only a year or two longer, we are likely to get what I’ve called Powerful AI, or “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

By contrast, policy—and especially legislation—moves very slowly.

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Michael Knapp at n+1:

Chuck Klosterman achieved cult star status in the early aughts by virtue of his pop-philosophical polemics on mainstream American culture. His subjects ranged from glam metal to John Cusack to Phil Jackson’s triangle offense, and his accessible eclecticism catapulted him into “the select and successful canon of reading for people who do not read,” according to Mark Greif. Klosterman started as a rock critic at Spin, later contributing to ESPN’s bloggy, irreverent offshoots Page 2 and Grantland (RIP). He became official Dorm-Room Philosopher Laureate in 2003, upon the release of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, which, at least from this ’90s-baby’s perch, seemed geared towards a certain strain of pop culture–conversant slacker coming of age on equal parts Primus, Clerks, and early-internet porn. “Do you think a girl has ever read one of your things?” Adam Friedland asked Klosterman in a recent interview. “It’s a little bit like being in Rush,” Klosterman replied. (The answer felt personally indicting: I spent the better part of eighth-grade spring break learning the bassline to Rush’s “Limelight.”)

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Rumors

I have entered that place,
that age, which is half living
and half just waiting.

Changes have come
and more are coming,
things deteriorate.

It is springtime too,
the blackbirds are whistling,
the roses are blooming.

The river is high from
melting snows and rain,
it roars by, night and day.

Children are playing
while the adults wear
expressions of disquiet.

There are rumors that
the future will not be
what it used to be.

We are together now,
in this time, in this state,
in this age of penultimacy.

by S. Abbas Raza,
June 6, 2026, for Margit

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John-Baptiste Oduor in The Guardian:

A friend’s mother once told me that for a couple of years in the 1980s – as the Conservatives were waging war on the miners and she spent late nights at Marxist-feminist reading groups – she wore an almost daily uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. On her wedding day she broke with habit and put on a dress she had bought, at great expense to her, that was fun, sexy and, although she didn’t use this word, flamboyant. The next week at the school she taught in she saw a colleague wearing it. “Nice dress,” she said. “It’s OK for work,” her colleague replied, “but I wouldn’t wear it out.”

I found myself recalling this anecdote as I read Jack Parlett’s memoir-cum-cultural history of our attempts to push the boat out. To make any effort is to risk embarrassment, to be seen either as ridiculous or hopelessly naive. One way to avoid those charges is to use playful or cynical irony. Parlett finds examples of this in Oscar Wilde and what the cultural critic Susan Sontag once described as camp, a worldview obsessed with artifice and performance. Although Flamboyance is not a polemic, it’s clear that its author sees something lacking in these efforts at self-fashioning. The book is couched as an alternative; Parlett presents flamboyance as a model for how to live a life that not only “burns with a resistant energy” but “puts politics back into the picture”. In practice, this means that he has little patience for the notion of art for art’s sake; he insists, for example, that there is no making sense of flamenco without understanding the history of fascism in Spain.

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Alexis Petridis in The Guardian:

In 1998, George Michael was arrested for public lewdness in an LA lavatory, an incident that finally led the singer to publicly come out. The following day, Sathnam Sanghera found himself unable to leave his room at university: the doorway had been mockingly plastered with tabloid newspaper headlines – “ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO!” – by fellow students aware of his longstanding fandom. As a writer, Sanghera is best known for a series of award-winning books on the British empire, which he calls his “specialist subject”. Judging by Tonight the Music Seems So Loud – not a biography so much as a miscellany, a set of themed essays that tend to digress in all kinds of intriguing directions – the life and work of one Georgios Panayiotou runs imperialism and its legacy a very close second.

It is an unashamedly partisan book, although not an uncritical one. Sanghera is as alive to Michael’s personal and professional failings (whether the naffness of some of his early work as one half of Wham! or his high-handed treatment of the duo’s other half, Andrew Ridgeley) as he is in love with his artistic triumphs. These, of course, range from Careless Whisper and Wham!’s annually inescapable Last Christmas to the 1996 solo masterpiece Older, a peculiar and peculiarly effective cocktail of raw grief at the Aids-related death of his lover Anselmo Feleppa and unrepentant horniness.

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